Hey there.

I want to help you design the most intelligent training session (i.e. practice) for your athletes, which is the goal of this email.

First, make sure you understand the “car analogy” I use to help you and your athletes focus on the three things we need to do in every training session:

1. Build the Aerobic Engine with challenging aerobic workouts.
2. “Strengthen the Chassis” with post-run strength and mobility.
3. “Rev the Engine” most days with strides.

Click ​here​ to download the PDF that explains this in depth.

Now let’s talk about…

The Four Elements of Each Practice 

1. Warm-up
2. Workout or easy run
3. Strides most days
4. Post-run work

Warm-up 

Let’s start with what we’re not doing. We’re not doing static stretching and then running. Instead, we’ll do a dynamic warm-up for runners, a warm-up that has our body moving in all three planes of motion.

Let’s get technical about this point for a moment…

Running is primarily a “sagittal plane” movement – the forward-backward plane. What’s important if you want to stay injury-free is to also move in the other two planes during your warm-up. The “transverse plane” is the body’s rotational plane, and the “frontal plane” is the body’s side-to-side plane. Runners typically ignore these planes, but that’s a problem.

Even though running is primarily a sagittal plane activity – moving forward – high school runners are well served when they maintain the athleticism that they bring to XC and track from other sports. In the same way a basketball or soccer player moves in all three planes of motion in their warm-ups, we want runners to be decent in all three planes of motion as they warm up.

My experience in 20 years of coaching is that...

Injuries greatly decrease when athletes commit to doing a dynamic warm-up that has them moving in all three planes of motion before every run or workout.

There are several ways to do this. Your athletes could do ​leg swings​ and the ​lunge matrix​, which will take a total of five minutes. This was my recommendation for over a decade, and it’s a good one, but today I have a better one.

The best dynamic warm-up a runner can do is Jeff Boelé’s, which you and your athletes can get for free on your phones.

This warm-up is specifically designed for competitive runners.

Thousands of high school cross country runners use it, and they swear by it. Once your athletes learn it, it will take a bit over 10 minutes. Although 10 minutes might seem too long for a warm-up, I can assure you it’s worth it. I want to reiterate the point that…

A proper dynamic warm-up before every run is crucial for athletes to stay injury-free. 

If you’re on board with this warm-up concept, then you need a PDF with all the exercises, and you need videos you can show your athletes.

To get the PDF, click ​here​. To watch the warm-up on YouTube for free, click ​here​. And to get the videos on your phone on an app that you can watch anywhere, click ​here​. And yes, you can share all of these links with your athletes!

Workouts 

In the next email, I’ll explain why we need to do challenging aerobic workouts and race pace workouts. In a few days, you’ll know both what the workout is and why you’ll want to use these workouts.

Strides

A stride is simply a quick, short, controlled sprint — anywhere from 70m to 150m — that’s faster than your race pace and much faster than your training paces. To be clear, this is not all out sprinting, but it’s also much faster than your athlete’s easy run pace. In my coaching, we’re often doing strides in the last 15-20 minutes of easy runs and long runs, so a stride at a 5000m pace is a dramatic change in pace on those days.

You might think, “Are you sure my runners should do strides during the run? I thought strides came after the run.” 

Trust me on this: When strides are something you assign your athletes to do after a run, they often don’t get done.

Plus, running with great posture when your kids are a bit fatigued reminds their body (and mind) that they’ll have to do the same in a race.

We don’t do strides following the challenging aerobic workouts, but we’ll get in strides every other day that we run. On the days we do race pace workouts, we’ll finish with fast running, so we don’t need to tack on strides to the end of the workout (I’ll make a compelling case for this in a future email - stay tuned!)

One final point regarding strides…

One of the biggest mistakes I see coaches make when they design training is they don’t have kids running strides the first day of practice. This applies to both the start of summer cross country training and winter track training. I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read my full rationale for why strides are important in ​this article​.

Make sure to download the ​free PDF of a progression of strides​ you can use that will keep your kids injury-free and get them running 1600m, 800m, and 400m paces as soon as possible.

The final part of each workout is…

Post-run Strength and Mobility

As you remember from the car analogy, you have to assign work that “strengthens the chassis” if you’re going to keep your athletes injury-free.

This is the time in the training session when we do this work.

So often, coaches have a hodgepodge of core strength exercises they’ve seen on social media or YouTube. Theoretically, that’s better than nothing, but there is a better way.

The post-run work that you have access to today is well thought-out and has been refined by myself and other coaches for over 15 years. Each day’s assignment will start with challenging body weight work, then move into core strength, and then end with mobility work. And some days we’ll end with work to strengthen the feet and lower legs.

Here’s the ​free PDF​ of all the exercises and routines you’ll need. To access the videos on your phone on a free app, click ​here​.

Alright, that’s enough for today. I hope you’ll dive into the free PDFs and videos above - you’ll learn a ton if you do.

What we have yet to talk about are the challenging aerobic workouts your athletes need to do to build their aerobic engines. Be on the lookout in a couple of days for an email from ​[email protected]​ where I share the rationale for these workouts and how to teach your athletes to execute them properly.

Let’s go!

Jay